This is what I told my son today.
1. May the Lord bless you and keep you everyday of your life, little buddy.
2. Oh Mother of God! (during a diaper change)
3. Don’t worry buddy. You’re gonna be 12 feet tall, 8,000 tons, and you won’t have to worry about being tackled cuz you’re gonna be a dinosaur on the football field. A real dinosaur! ROAR.
I’m working my way up to being this kind of dad. I’m getting there.
Oliver turned three months old yesterday and he decided to celebrate by wearing a bowtie, doning an Ivy League sweater, and visiting a Whole Foods in New Jersey.
If I didn’t know better, I would swear he’s trying to show up the snazziness of his dad.
Over the last week, Oliver has developed a few habits that are brand new. For one, he’s cooing at us a lot more. He loves having conversations with us and actually will get mad if we don’t include him in our wider conversations about pop culture, gossip queens, and who-is-being-wrong-on-the-internet at the moment. He’s kinda like a cat: he wants to be noticed but on his terms. Chula is obviously teaching him things when I am not around.
But beyond the conversations we’ve been having (and since it is near Halloween, I must quote Nightmare before Christmas by saying that we’re having conversations worth having), Oliver is starting to go to bed earlier but waking up more in the middle of the night. Like clockwork, he is down for the count by 10 pm and up at 3 am and 6 am for a feeding. I have no idea why he’s doing this but it seems to be a fairly normal part of baby development. And my poor wife, after feeding him twice, typically elbows me and tells me that Oliver is my responsibility the next time he cries (which he does, like clockwork, at 7 am). Luckily I have mountains of coffee to sustain me while my wife gets the rest she deserves.
Oliver is also learning what it is like living in a cold NYC apartment. Now that the temperature has started to drop into the 30s this week, and our landlord is refusing to turn on the heat, we’ve been struggling trying to figure out if he’s actually warm enough at night. Since he’s only 3 months old, we’re not letting him sleep with blankets yet. Instead, we’re wrapping him up in footie pjs, socks, and keeping him as far from the windows as possible. He doesn’t seem to complain about the weather but I have no idea if he even knows how to complain about being cold. He does know how to complain about gas, being hungry, and that there’s a dog licking his face so I’m assuming he’d get upset if he’s cold but he might just not know what that means yet. And this morning, when the temperature dropped below freezing, he seems to be napping comfortably. Babies – you just never know what they’re going through. I feel like I’m becoming a Will Smith song. Sorry Oliver, sometimes parents really don’t understand.
Yesterday was another milestone in the life of Oliver. He went to daycare for the first time.
My seminary offers subsidized daycare for students (thankfully!) so I packed up his gear while my wife packed up Oliver and we headed down to Chelsea. We arrived, popped into the daycare center, and were confronted by seven unhappy babies. With the new faces in the room, some babies decided to go wild and cry, cry, cry. Others were cranky because they needed a nap. Some were having their breakfast and demanded more. And Oliver – well, Oliver was picked up by one of the workers, placed on her lap, and proceeded to be as cool as a cucumber and he smiled at everyone in the place. Other kids came to say hi to him (and to try to steal his pacifier) while others were jealous of the attention he received. Soon, he was sharing the lap with a six month old girl who, to be honest, is the same size as him. Oliver was just happy as a clam and started flirting with all the ladies around him. What can I say? He’s a player, he’s a baller, he’s a game changer – a chip off the old block if I do say so myself.
It took about 20 minutes to unpack his belongings and leave the daycare. It was tough to leave him but I was happy to see that he was the chill baby. In fact, I spent most of my time taking care of other babies while talking to the daycare staff about Oliver’s needs rather than pay attention to my big guy. I hope he doesn’t pick up any bad habits while there (though he’s gonna get sick – the miles of snot I saw would scare a pathogen movie maker). As we left, he was kicking around in a swing. When K arrived later that evening, he was the last baby there, in the same swing, and taking a nap. It sounds like he had a great day. He napped, ate a ton, and had a great time. He’s got a good life.
On the first Saturday of every month, my internship site runs a food pantry. Volunteers gather at 9:30 in the morning to sort groceries, place them in bags, and distribute around 120 bags of groceries to people in need. I typically do not participate in the Food Pantry but decided to this month. I arrived at 9:30 am to see about 75 people already lined up outside the church.
I was one of first volunteers (besides the head of this ministry) to show up and we got to work. I watched and mimicked my colleagues. I met some new people. I got to make faces at a baby who is only one day older than Oliver (and born at the same hospital no-less!). Food distribution began in earnest at 10:30 am. I helped record people who came into the door (we keeps tabs on who comes for statistics reporting – we do not require ID nor do we require people to prove their need but it is fascinating to see people who have been using this pantry for years, and since we record the dates they come, we can see when they are more financially stable and when they are not). It was a lot of fun.
About halfway through the distribution, a German tourist descended the stairwell and entered our fellowship hall. He chatted with our ministry director and it seemed he had a group of people who wanted to watch what we were doing. He kept naming dropped a name I didn’t know and said that this person told them to come “see what Advent is doing.” About a dozen people came downstairs, stood to the side, and watched. They asked questions. They all spoke in German. And they soon let us know that they were all German pastors from the Frankfurt area. Their numbers grew from a dozen to twenty. They seemed to be fans that we had a bathroom for anyone to use. We finished our food distribution, made some counts, and tried to hold off the questions from the pastors as graciously as we could. They were asking questions that our volunteers didn’t know the answer to but they were quickly introduced to me and I took them aside, once my work was done, to be grilled by these German pastors.
So – there I was – in the fellowship hall at my internship site, discussing our food ministry programs with twenty pastors from Germany. They were all much older than me but most listened to me as one in authority (there were a few who looked like they’d rather be visiting Times Square but that’s fine – who could blame them?) They spoke perfect English, asked good questions, were curious about our partnerships with local government and other congregations/synagogues in the areas, and were very concerned about the people who entered our doors. They asked if I visited them (we don’t really). They seemed partially concerned that there were no pastors (just vicars) helping with the distribution. They asked if I tried to witness their living conditions and see if I can improve them (in a perfect world, we could do that but, again, as an institution, we have limited resources – they only thing we could do, and that we do do, is direct people to other charities and government sources of help). That last question, they repeated several times. That seemed to be the hardest question to answer for them. They spoke as committed individuals to the cause of social justice. None mentioned God, or Jesus, or spoke in any faith-based language. They were concerned about knowing people, forming relationships, and having resources to help change the living situations of the people in the neighborhood. I admired that.
But it came off as very…I dunno. Their language and mannerisms seemed to suppose that my congregation should have access to financial and institutional resources that we really don’t. They kept asking about food donations from supermarkets (which we accept) but didn’t seem to understand how unreliable such a system is for us and how we use grants (or our own funds) to support our food programs. When I threw out the few financial numbers I knew (and that I might have made up based on some educated guesses), the numbers surprised them. They didn’t seem to speak, or think, in a language of dollars and cents. Rather, they assumed an environment of institutional cooperation that allowed mutual enhancement of mission. The problem is that this doesn’t exist, all that much, in the United States. We have to think in dollars and cents or else social ministry just doesn’t get done.
The group of pastors thanked me for my time and they were very nice. They were inquisitive, always asking questions, and in their questions, pointing towards institutional relationships that we might be interested in working on. But institutional relationships are hard to maintain. Right now, from my experience with our neighborhood ecumenical groups, it is individual relationships between leaders that sustain these relationships. If that one-on-one relationship is lost, or broken, the institutional relationship dissolves. That’s probably something we should work on as group – but how to change that, I do not know.
Oh. And one more thing. They kept taking pictures of ME as I spoke. That made me really self-conscious. I just wish I knew they were going to be coming. I would have dressed up. I would have put on a collar. I would have made sure that they weren’t experiencing a vicar who attended a food pantry wearing a t-shirt with a hotdog, in an eye patch, holding a smoking gun. Darn it.
I wonder if the reason why Spark curriculum series decided to talk about Genesis 2 on Sunday rather than Mark 10 because Genesis 2 is a lot more fun and easy to turn into games and color leaflets. I don’t blame them for that – I’ve been wracking my brain all week to think if there’s a way to talk about divorce, and Jesus’s harshness, in a Sunday School setting. I really can’t think of one that is healthy and easy to condense into a 45 minute teaching moment. So, Genesis 2 it is then. Of course, Genesis 2 isn’t easy either, especially for those of us who find “complementary” theology ridiculous and serve in a denominational body that allows women pastors and leaders, mostly because of the history around the use of Genesis 2 can be troubling and hard to examine. But I still wonder – can there not be a space, in church, to talk about divorce? There should be. I just don’t know how to do it yet.
You know, I thought that, during my internship, I’d have time to blog all the time. But…I…yeah..that’s not happening. Everything is going great. I’m writing Sunday School lessons, visiting folks in hospital, and sending out 200 emails a day. It has been a blast. But, well, when I come home, I see these two, and I just can’t find the time to write about the day.
I’m enjoying be a vicaring dad.
Today was our first confirmation class of the season. It went well. We had a large class, the kids were in the right spirit, and it went really well. I was happy with the whole thing.
But there is something they don’t tell you about urban ministry that they really should. My internship site tries to keep its doors open as much as possible. It is a rarity in urban ministry to have a church with open doors. So, as the entire class sat in the front of the sanctuary, teaching, learning, and growing, several gentlemen and women from the neighborhood, or who were just passing through, entered the sanctuary. They would sit, pray, spend the time they need with their thoughts and with God, and then go about their way. This is normal at my internship site. A gentlemen came in like every other. He sat in the very back pew, next to a parent of one of the confirmation kids who came early. He sat there for maybe thirty minutes. As we neared the end of confirmation, wrapping up our talk about the first commandment and a nice derail about whether God is a hypocrite for being a jealous God, seven uniformed policemen walk through the door.
My internship supervisor quickly got up and met the officers. The officers approached the gentlemen in the back row and questioned him. It took only a moment. They confirmed what they need to and escort him out of the building to arrest him. The cops told my supervisor that the guy appears to have stole an iPhone and they tracked him through the GPS on the phone to the church. The parent of the confirmation kid tells my supervisor that the gentlemen was sitting and waiting to talk to the pastor (though my supervisor never saw this gentlemen before). The kids, of course, were curious and everyone was watching and going “what’s going on?” It was wild. As the gentlemen was escorted out of the building, one of our students saw the undercover cops who also showed up randomly to help out. She turned to me and said “okay, this is now my high for the week.”
Yes it was kid. Yes it was.
Le Chéile in Washington Heights, New York City. August 24, 2012
365 Part Deux
DONE. And I only had to extend the project an extra 2 weeks to “get” 365 in 365. I could have done worse.
OH YEAH. MY SON ROLLED OVER. BOOYAH!
I’m a proud poppa.
Though, since he is now into the next level of his existence, I wonder if I’m still allowed to look at him and ask him, in all seriousness, in the most serious-baby-type-voice I have, why he doesn’t have a neck. He could use one, that’s all I’m saying.
They grow up so fast.
